The Magical Drug
by penxbrieezee
Summary: Hanji gives Eren a mysterious drug that goes against her original hypothesis. As Eren goes through the side effects, can he figure out just what is going on inside his body? Some Eren x Levi down the road.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: So, my first story! It's still a bit of a work in progress, obviously. I'm planning on making it multiple chapters because it'll be kind of difficult to make all of my thoughts fit into one. I know this is a bit short, but I can't guarantee that any of them will be very long. I hope you enjoy it, though! It's gonna become Eren x Levi down the road somewhere. Just be patient.**

* * *

><p>"Are you sure this is going to work, Hanji?" Eren asked as he rolled up his pajama sleeves. Hanji had woken him up at three in the morning because she had come up with an ingenious drug that she hypothesized would turn Eren into a titan at the point of contact. The drug was a clear, almost thick liquid that nobody in their right mind would put into anybody else's body.<p>

But Hanji was never in her right mind.

"Of course it'll work, darling," Hanji said sweetly as she led Eren outside to the HQ's well, "Have I ever been wrong?" Eren tried to think of a time that she had been wrong, but after coming to no conclusions he just shook his head.

"I guess not." Eren said. He stared at the deadly-looking syringe in Hanji's hand, memories of his dad flooding into his head. The boy began to feel sick to his stomach. "Do you even know if this is going to work? I mean, did you test it on anything else before me?"

"Nope," Hanji sanitized the soft spot of Eren's arm and said feverishly, "So I guess it's just a do-or-die situation, right, Eren?"

Eren didn't have time to protest when Hanji stuck him with the syringe. She pushed down on the small pump, and the liquid formed a painful lump the size of a penny under Eren's skin. Against Hanji's hypothesis, the drug didn't turn him into a titan at the point of contact. The boy stared at the painful lump on his arm while Hanji watched him for any changes, although Eren didn't feel any urge to change at all. A very, very small stream of smoke trailed from where the needle had poked him. His titan powers were quickly healing the small penetration.

Hanji looked up at the white moon and made a muffled sound of concentration as she pulled out a small note book out of her jacket and wrote something seemingly important in it. She smiled and put it away before looking back at her test subject. "So, how do you feel?" She asked.

"How do I feel?" Eren began to feel panicky. He grabbed his upper arm just above the lump and thrust himself to Hanji. "How am I _supposed _to feel, Hanji? You injected some mysterious, possibly deadly liquid-thing into my arm! What if I die?"

"Oh, calm down Mr. Feisty-Pants. You're fine." Hanji smiled and at Eren and patted his shoulders. Eren looked down at the lump on his arm that showed no sign of going away any time soon. Hanji watched him.

"Don't touch it," she said, "Touching it may reverse whatever it's doing to you."

"But what if it's doing something _bad, _Hanji?"

"Jesus, Levi was right," the mad scientist laughed and shook her head, "You really are whiny, Mr. Feisty-Pants. Go back to bed, Eren. I'm sure that the lump will be gone by the time you wake up!" And with that, Hanji walked back to HQ and left Eren outside, standing in the blue-gray moonlight next to the well of the previously failed titan experiment.


	2. Chapter 2

Eren woke up the morning with a pounding headache. Sure, the painful lump was gone, but it felt as though that painful lump had left his arm and moved to every crevice of his head and was just aching to push itself out of his skull. When Levi came into Eren's underground bedroom, the sound of his footsteps ricochet off the walls and stabbed at Eren's headache. The captain stopped at the edge of Eren's bed and viciously kicked the bedframe with the tip of his boot.

"Eren, get up." Levi made his way to a small dresser across the room and lit a small candle atop of its wooden face. Eren groaned at the coarse sound of the captain's voice.

"We have a lot to do today, Eren." Levi stared at the boy. Eren showed no signs of getting up. Levi's own headache was begging him to get away from the light of the candle. It was silent as Levi stood in the middle of the musty room.

"Sir…" Eren groaned, shifting closer to where Levi stood, "I don't feel well…"

"Yeah," Levi inferred derisively. Eren just nodded in response, "Tough it out, Jaeger. You have chores to do that are far more important than your bullshit whining." This seemed to dishearten the boy and this somewhat pleased Levi since he enjoyed disheartening the little bastard. Levi walked to the entrance way and out of the room.

Eren listened to Levi's footsteps until no more could be heard. For Eren, it ached to even move, and the light of the candle hurt Eren's eyes with the ferocity of the sun. He just wanted to fell back into that dark abyss that was sleep, but he knew that if he did that his superior would surely kill him. The titan-shifter slowly pulled himself out of his bed and onto the wooden floor. He painfully padded over to his used wardrobe. Pulling open the double doors exerted pain from his arms and the creaking of the hinges tore at his eardrums. Eren took out and put on his usual civilian clothes, adding a white handkerchief around his neck for the day's chores.

He tried to ignore the tiresome task of walking up the stairs—Lord knows why they didn't have a fucking _elevator _down there—and he finally made his way to the surface. It was a normal-looking day, and all Eren had to do was the bathrooms. Doing the bathrooms, Eren learned, is harder than it sounds. Eren thought that it wouldn't have been all that hard the first time (but of course, that was his other, over-confident self speaking), but there is a woman's bathroom and a men's bathroom with separate stalls and separate facilities. Cleaning the women's bathroom, as one can imagine, is a terribly awkward thing for Eren to do.

First, he scrubs the toilets, and whenever a female cadet wants to use that stall Eren gets the uncomfortable privilege of looking up at her from the floor and telling her that the stall is occupied for the time being. He tried previously to just lock the stall door behind him, but after several worried reports of seeing a cadet on their knees in a bathroom stall he decided that maybe that wasn't the best course of action. Secondly, he cleans the sinks. The women, for some reason, don't see this part of his task as anything strange and they just continue on with their day as if Eren was never there. For some strange reason, it seems, as Eren does his third task of sweeping and mopping the floor, that the female cadets feel very uncomfortable with him there. When they walk in, sometimes in laughing groups of three or four (even Mikasa does this), anything that they were previously talking about before they came in ceases to a halt and they stand staring at Eren in silence. Eren tries to ignore their presence, but the silence falls deeper into that awkward hole every time the mop does the _schloop, schloop, schloop _sound.

Eren does not like to clean the women's bathroom.

With the men, it's different. He does everything the same as he does in the women's bathroom, in order, and comes across little to no awkward situations. The most awkward part of cleaning the men's bathroom is cleaning the urinals; every day, without fail, at 7:30 in the morning Reiner uses the same exact urinal that happens to be right next to whatever urinal Eren is cleaning. Eren prays, prays, _prays _that Reiner would continue to aim right or the Reiner wouldn't talk to him during this uncomfortable amount of time. So far, God has answered his prayers and nothing like that has happened. Eren has expressed his discomfort with this part of the chore to Levi, Mikasa, and Armin, and every one of them wonders why Eren hasn't learned to clean the urinals last yet.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: I swear to God, that last chapter was supposed to have some kind of plot. It almost did? In the beginning, I guess, but I'm sorry. I hadn't meant for the rest of it to be about Eren's bathroom habits. Sorry. I promise to make this one more, um, on-point. OP, I guess. Enjoy!**

* * *

><p>The chores were a blast, obviously. It took hours for Eren to finish his chores because every time somebody used the bathroom he would have to clean up after them. It was quite a "shitty" job.<p>

When Eren finished his chores, it was 11:30 a.m. His headache was less persistent now, so he could finally somewhat enjoy the rest of his day. Since he had some extra time on his hands he decided that he would look for Hanji and report what has happened to him via The Drug.

Hanji's "office' wasn't that far from the bathrooms (considering that the bathroom was probably where she conjured up most of her magic; many times has Eren found mysterious chemicals stored in an "out-of-order" stall) and it didn't take that long for him to walk over there. Her "office", which was basically just a room in the wing of the castle that was used to house officers, was normal enough from the outside. In the upper-middle of the mahogany-colored door was a wooden engraving of her name. In all actuality, it seemed to Eren that nobody lived there. Perhaps it was because of the freshly polished doorknob (which was Jean's job) or the little to no damage done to the doorframe's woodwork. Observing the rest of the doors, it could be noted that Commander Erwin, Captain Levi, and the other officers often took out their anger on their doorframes (especially Levi, it seemed; whole chunks were either punched or kicked out of the doorway, which left the door a bit ajar. A particular crevasse, by far the largest on the doorframe, had a bit of dried blood along its brim. This explained the blood-ridden bandage delicately wrapped around the captain's knuckles that had worried Eren so many weeks ago). But, strangely enough, Hanji's door had no marks beside the generic scratches from old age. The impersonal appearance of the doorknob and the doorframe and the engraving made Eren hesitant to knock on the door, fearing that he'd get no reply and have to search the castle for its mad scientist, but before Eren could knock, the door opened. Hanji emerged, feigningly messing with the buckles on her military uniform. She was surprised to see him outside of her door, and she gladly greeted him with a smile.

"Great morning, Eren1' Hanji nudged the boy's shoulder. She never said "good" morning because she believed that doing so would contribute to the day's discredit. "Great" morning, for the most part, sufficed her incessant need of knowledge and happiness, but Eren was sure that if Hanji could put eight or ten more positive adjectives in front of morning, she would.

"Oh, uh, g-great morning, Hanji." Eren replied.

"How are you feeling? Did The Drug do anything to you?" Hanji asked these questions as she made her way down the hall, past Eren, and towards the stairs. Eren hastily followed her. Hanji took out her notebook and pencil stub, and she made a note to herself to get a new pencil.

"Oh, I'm okay now. The lump is gone, "Eren displayed his bare arm to her as she took notes, "But I had a terrible headache when I woke up. It was almost like a migraine—well—yeah, _almost _like a migraine. But that's gone now, too."

To all of this, Hanji made multiple noises of approval and nodded her head many times. It seemed vitally important to Eren that this information be written down, although there wasn't much to write because when he was done talking about his Almost Migraine he had nothing else to report. And besides, during most of Eren's I'm-helpful-because-you-injected-a-drug-in-me speech, she was just doodling a titan in the upper right-hand corner of her paper. So it goes.

"So, the side-effects of The Drug: a bad case of an Almost Migraine!" Hanji said this happily and dotted her sentence with the same emotion. "Is that all?"

Eren recalled his past few hours and nodded. Suddenly, he began to think about the mangled doorways of the officers; the aggressive look of the damage done to the woodwork reflected the same ferocity used in the extermination of titans, Eren noticed. Eren had come to believe that killing titans was a side-effect of intense anger, as it was for him. But he was never really straight-up _angry _in his free time. In fact, he was a generally happy person most days and has never taken out his anger on his doorway. It hurt him the think that the people who he cared for the most have such terrible emotional outbursts like that. He wondered how somebody so seemingly calm and collected like Levi could be so angry inside. Flimsily, Eren asked Hanji, "Hanji, why did Levi punch his doorframe so hard that his hand bled?"

The adorable innocence in his tone while asking this struck Hanji's fancy and she couldn't help but smile a I-pity-you-but-you're-cute smile at him.

"I don't really know, Eren," she said, "I think that the captain just holds a lot of anger inside of him." Which was a lie; she knew why, and at any rate the hypothesis was very vague, so unlike her usual hypotheses. Eren was still too new to be aware of that, though, and too naïve to notice that she was lying and she really _did _know why Levi had done that.

But, seeing as Eren was new and naïve, he saw this hypothesis as completely acceptable, and expressed his acceptance through a sound that was probably the combination of a grunt and a whisper.

When Eren and Hanji parted ways in front of the mess hall (Hanji went inside—Eren stayed out) he continued to contemplate the plausibility of her hypothesis. He remembered times when the captain had hard-heartedly beat the living shit out of him, and sometimes in the middle of those beatings, it would look as if Levi was making to kick him again when his leg would stop in mid-kick and he'd just stare down at the boy. Levi would then tell him to go clean himself up and go back to his cesspool of a room. Eren concluded that stopping himself during the beatings is what had bottled up all of Levi's anger; Levi never took out _all _of his anger that was inside, and he bottled up what was left. But Eren was wrong. Hanji knew why Levi did this. She was the only one who knew.


End file.
